


B-612

by beautify



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 19:29:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17452904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beautify/pseuds/beautify
Summary: A series of interludes on a very small star.





	B-612

**Author's Note:**

> this was written for the [yoi space zine](http://yoispacezine.tumblr.com) and has taken heavy inspiration from antoine de saint-exupéry's le petit prince, which can be read online [here](http://www.yoanaj.co.il/uploadimages/The_Little_Prince.pdf). if you haven't read the book you may find the premise a little strange/confusing/unexpected!

One minute Victor was lost at sea, fumbling in the dark, sick with loneliness — and then, in a blue-hot flash, there was light, sound, gravity. There was sand and the smell of wildflowers. There was someone sitting by him, speaking softly to him, so that he wouldn’t feel alone.

“Hello,” he said, blinking slow, feeling dazed. Of course he was so bleary, so dizzy that it was impossible to make out anything beyond a blurry face, and above that, an inky sky, a cloud of stars. But it was enough, he thought, to be near someone, anyone, anyone at all.

“Oh, you’re awake,” said the stranger, and then after a pause: “Hello.” Victor’s heart bled a little at the sound of their voice. They sounded almost shy. “Are you lost?”

“So, so lost,” Victor said, sounding pained. There was a touch of laughter. Probably feeling sorry for him, his companion brushed his hair out of his face and patted him on the cheek. Bizarrely, Victor felt as if he had come home to a very old friend. “Do you mind — ” he yawned, “ — if I stay, just for a little while…”

His friend didn’t say anything, but put a hand over Victor’s eyes, cool and fine: a promise to be nice. As he drifted off to sleep, blanketed by wind and sand and stars, Victor thought that it was, somehow, the sweetest thing anyone had ever done — and with the state he was in he might have started crying, after months of wretched loneliness, but he was too weary even for that. So he fell asleep, tucked away in that little blue acre of cosmos, and for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t even lonely.

 

*

 

There wasn’t much he remembered after that. He knew now that his friend’s name was Yuuri. He knew that he had fallen asleep in a desert, only to wake up surrounded by wildflowers and grass — which meant that Yuuri had not only taken Victor’s invasion in stride, but in fact carried him out of the desert, and into a lush little garden, where he had been appraised by one or two rabbits, and then summarily tolerated for the rest of his stay.

After the crash, Yuuri had brought Victor’s things to him wrapped in a little kerchief — shawls, pearls, jars of leaves — and hung up fragments of his ship like clothes on a washing line. Strange, but Victor had nothing to show for his shallow dive from outer space other than a rather becoming scrape on his forehead, and yet here Yuuri seemed to think it was only natural that he let Victor stay and recover.

Meanwhile there was very little Victor could do to try and make up to Yuuri his intrusion, but still he tried to gracious, and introduce himself to each of Yuuri’s rabbits, and show Yuuri things he’d never seen before, in the hopes that one day he might forgive Victor. For instance:

“What’s that?” Yuuri asked him, one dusky evening, peering over Victor’s shoulder at the little curl of green in Victor’s palm.

“Caterpillar,” said Victor. “Say hello?”

“Hello,” Yuuri said to it, before giving Victor an odd look. “Where did you get it?”

“To be honest with you, I don’t remember where I picked it up.” Victor crouched down to let the creature roam around in the dirt. Soon it would find a leaf to devour. Victor hoped Yuuri wouldn’t mind too much. He’d already let loose some others, anyhow.

Yuuri was intently watching his new cohabitant as it wormed across the ground. “It’s moving.”

“But wait,” Victor said, “there’s more!”

What luck, what fortune. Yuuri was so wonderfully easy to please. Had Victor been able to show Yuuri in time what eventually became of garden caterpillars, he would’ve been over the moon.

And yet, Victor thought, there was also something rather melancholy about it all. The little star on which he sat was so small it could hardly stand to sustain much more than seven rabbits and some caterpillars and a Yuuri. First and foremost this meant that there was no room for Victor to stay, at least not for very long. But of course what this also meant was that Yuuri would be alone when Victor left. And even worse, it meant that Yuuri had been alone before Victor had arrived.

And yet did Yuuri ever leave? Did he ever think to wander off to nearby stars and say hello to his neighbours?

“Who would look after the rabbits?” Yuuri asked, hand flung over his eyes, his voice thick with sleep. He was still stirring from a daytime nap. Admittedly Victor hadn’t considered it. “Buh. I don’t think I have any neighbors.”

“Everyone has a neighbor.” (Upwards glance at outer space.) “Yours are just…further away.”

“Well,” said Yuuri, sounding a little pettish, a little blue. “Mine don’t like to visit me.”

 

*

 

In all seriousness Victor ought to have been working on repairing his ship and yet here he was, doing nothing of the sort. Instead he was lazing, trespassing, being a bother to Yuuri. It always seemed far too hot, too difficult to do anything more taxing than idly lie around, sunning like a seal.

Only Yuuri didn’t seem to mind.

“Do you really like it here?” Yuuri asked him one day, with a slightly baffled look on his face.

The two of them were sprawled out in the grass, awash in the glow of the mango-y sun. The air was sweet and smelled of nectar, insects burred all around them, Victor had spent the entire day running around, doing nothing useful, acting a total ditz — and now the sun was setting, and here the whole of Yuuri’s little star was bathed in the last rays of the dying sun.

“I do,” Victor said honestly, an open look on his face. “I like everything here.”

“Oh.” Yuuri rubbed his eyes. His face was ablush, skin all honey in the sultry heat. “…Oh,” he said again, sitting down, a few feet from Victor. But he didn’t seem unhappy: instead he looked secretly rather pleased, as if he had already put all his faith in Victor, who should have just been some simpatico stranger, and nothing more, and yet, and yet —

 

*

 

There were earthquakes. There were sandstorms. It often stormed. Yuuri’s star was not the timeless paradise it had been when Victor had first fallen out of the sky.

One did eventually get the impression that Yuuri’s star could not handle having the two of them for much longer.

 

*

 

The ship had been repaired! Great voyages were to come! But not until Victor polished the hull first. Also, his scrape had not _fully_ healed — he asked Yuuri to inspect it several times a day — and he didn’t want to jump the gun.

“It’s still a little bit red,” Yuuri mused, lifting Victor’s fringe out of his face to peer at his forehead.

“A terrible shame,” said Victor.

Broad strokes of lightning in the distance. Fat droplets of rain fell like opals from above. The two of them were sat in the shelter of a large palm frond, huddled together in the storm. Yuuri flinched at a thunderclap. This was no good. As Victor took in the fine details of Yuuri’s profile — the wrinkle between his brows, the way his lower lip jutted out, his little pout at the wretchedness of the day — something became clear. Poor Yuuri was afraid of storms. And he, too, saw that his star was beginning to crumple, that it was only a matter of time.

Yet in spite of it all he said nothing, and he sat quietly by Victor’s side in the pouring rain, with a boyish, sullen look on his face — which somehow made it worse, harder to pull away, give up, and allow the sun to set on something which felt, for all in the world, like something good and right and true.

 

*

 

It felt as though summer on Yuuri’s star had only lasted a minute or two, Victor thought idly, looking around one morning and noticing (rather belatedly) that there was snow everywhere. The rabbits, now fat off wildflowers, were nowhere to be seen. The caterpillars were now cocoons. Had it all really been much more than a single, exquisite afternoon? Victor languished.

“Hello, you,” he said to Yuuri, once he’d found him, sitting on a hilltop with his hands folded sweetly in his lap, watching the sunset.

“Hello yourself,” Yuuri said, then patted the empty space next to him. His cheeks were flushed with the cold. Pink like roses. Here Victor realized he would never meet someone so radiant ever again. He sat, looking dreamy, feeling useless.

After a pause, maybe sensing Victor’s impending dramatics, Yuuri said, “Everyone goes to sleep in the winter, except me.” In some dim corner of his mind Victor had the vague understanding that Yuuri was talking about the rabbits. “You’re leaving too, aren’t you?”

“I am,” Victor told him.

“That’s good,” said Yuuri, sounding distant. “You’d get lonely if you stayed.” He looked as if he wanted to say more, but instead he looked down. Though Victor knew that Yuuri had probably endured lonely winters a thousand times before, to Victor it still seemed unimaginably cruel to leave him, blue and oh-so-forlorn, all by himself in the glittering dark.

But by now he understood that he was meant to leave, that here Yuuri finally wanted him to leave. Maybe if Yuuri hadn’t been so lovely, so gracious, back when Victor had fallen out of the sky, maybe then — but never mind, Victor thought. It was too late now.

Yuuri’s face was bright in the pale, arctic light. He watched Victor raptly, emitting nothing, betraying nothing, until he said, “The caterpillars — is it okay if I keep them?”

“Yes. Obviously. They’ll love you. Oh, Yuuri.” Seized for a moment by hysterics, Victor leaned forward to kiss him briefly on the forehead. “Will you come with me? No, I mean — just for a moment. Come say goodbye.”

 

*

 

In his time as a convalescent, Victor had given Yuuri four caterpillars, a blue shawl, several handfuls of flowers, some pumpkin and melon seeds, and one fleeting kiss on the forehead. It wasn’t nearly enough.

“Just give me a second,” said Victor, having already spent several minutes rummaging through his ship’s inventory. Surely he had something slightly nicer than a caterpillar, something which would last. Flowers died. Pumpkins were eaten. Kisses were so tragically ephemeral.

“Victor.” Stood outside, wearing a little hat of snow, was Yuuri and his newly-acquired air of long-suffering.

 _Voilà_ , Victor thought, his fingertips brushing something round and golden. “Give me your hand,” he said.

Yuuri did. And then he was being garnished, and then he was blinking fast, gazing in wonder at his newly-twinkling hand, with a rather bashful look on his face.

“You were such an — ” _Angel_ , Victor tried to say, but Yuuri had stepped closer, mouth wobbling, and buried his hot face in Victor’s chest. Presumably he could feel the warm glow of Victor’s heart. For a moment Victor thought he might start crying, but it would embarrass them both — Yuuri not knowing what tears were, Victor having to explain it to him — so he held back, and tousled Yuuri’s hair instead.

Above them, the sky was rich and dark and wild with stars, all of them a million miles away, long gone, nothing but a distant memory — but down here, on Yuuri’s little star, everything was soft and snowy. Everything was alive. More importantly, everything was loved and would stay that way long after Victor was gone.

The star would blaze on. A hundred years would go by. And Victor would miss him still.


End file.
